This is the ninth book of the Tess Monaghan series, and more so than the ones in which she faced certain mortal peril, I find this one super scary. The issue with this is one is not that someone might kill, but that someone with infinite more power than her will use it to destroy her life. This story also focuses heavily on Crowe, Tess’s boyfriend, who is reckoning with his position as more or less well off (not necessarily rich, but with a support system he could fall back on), white, and middle class in a city that is 2/3 Black with a high murder rate, a steady and violent drug trade, and visible and visceral poverty. I probably didn’t feel this exact way in Baltimore when I lived there, believing at the time that racism and poverty were individualistic and personal, and not systematic, systemic, and pervasive. I more or less feel similar to Crowe in a lot of way now in Richmond. Baltimore and Richmond have similar problems, if slightly different daily realities.
The mystery circulates around a months old murder of a US Attorney, whose death has been rumored to be connected to a cruising gone wrong, and because of this, secretive. But a new witness unwittingly provides some evidence on the crime and Tess and Crowe become quickly embroiled.
What’s scary about this book is how the full power of the US Justice system is leveraged against Tess in ways that I find incredibly scary, like the whole world needs to end and we need to restart kind of scary. I more or less feel that all the time, but it’s not always an extension of fear and anxiety as opposed to injustice. It’s the kind of novel that makes white people have to admit the power that centralized law enforcement has and how it does not care who you are if you get in its way.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/No-Good-Deeds-Monaghan-Novel/dp/0062403281/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1572905101&sr=8-1)